Quotes About Richard Dawkins

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.

Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.

I didn't study science beyond high school level, but I'd been reading a lot of science books by people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett. I also spent a year working on a fellowship in a research centre - the Allan Wilson Centre - where I got a hands-on look at their work sequencing DNA.

I was sent a copy of Richard Dawkins' amusing book, The God Delusion, by an anonymous donor, so I feel I should at least try to review it. This isn't easy. I got as far as page 36 before chucking it across the room in disgust. I was in the Boston Tea Party on Park Street in Bristol. I warned the other customers to get out of my line of fire first.

As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?  Otto:     Apes don't read philosophy.  Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. A Fish Called Wanda (1988) One cannot help but think of A Fish Called Wanda when one reads Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion; or at least I can't.

If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps. [Criticizing Richard Dawkins]

The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two miracles.

Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.

You know what I'm intrigued by? Like, space and wormholes and Stephen Hawking's theories and Richard Dawkins's theories. That's what I care about.

As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.

Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by "memes," a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.

Few would argue that Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist, especially now that his friend and rival for the title, Christopher Hitchens, has now gone to meet his Maker.

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.

I think Douglas [Adams] is writing with an eye to irony for adults at the same time as entertaining children.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term 'meme' for a unit of cultural imitation.

Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins . And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism . But Dawkins ' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non- Darwinian .